27TH ANNUAL CAF-IAD-OAS CONFERENCE

September 5, 2024 - Washington, DC

Dear friends, colleagues, I will talk about what I believe is the most crucial issue that we have in the hemisphere. People in poverty should shame societies and institutions and challenge us about our aspirations and principles. There are no magic, simple or immediate solutions in the fight against poverty. But we need solutions, and we need to start working on them. This fight involves policies and tasks aimed at combating poverty and its causes. Sometimes we have seen countless brilliant speeches to eliminate poverty, but they remain only words, sometimes without policies or concrete actions to achieve them, which allows poverty to keep reproducing under the umbrella of the speech. We want to live in a region of peace, a region that experiences peace and lives it.

And for peace to be the main source of identity for the region's people. A region at peace is the best possible way to put an end to the scourges afflicting the hemisphere. Peace offers a solid foundation for identifying structural solutions to the problems we face.

Similarly, peace needs support to make it stable and enduring, and that support is the elimination of poverty. We live in the world's most unequal region, and as nations and as people, we should be ashamed of that. We do not identify with inequality.

We identify with equity, justice and equal access to rights and development. We live in one of the world's poorest regions, yet we do not identify with the condition of poverty. We do, however, identify with a region of increasing prosperity and with a framework of rights for more people in our hemisphere.

We identify with the political choice that acts in favor of freedom and equity. Poverty is the enemy of both. In recent years, the fight against poverty has been impacted by falling rates of growth, a pandemic and rising inflation, which has exacerbated our structural problems and crises.

And a good number of forecasts indicate that it will be worse in the near future. Poverty and extreme poverty have been on the rise, and we cannot accept that they will never fall again. That is why it is necessary to start working on a solution.

And of course, we are going to face obstacles, social, political, economic. Obstacles that lie in the structures that exist to be kept. This structure is of special interest.

The fight against poverty is not impossible, and it should be an imperative to tackle with seriousness, discipline and perseverance. We must concentrate our efforts on that fight. It is not impossible so long as we do not allow ourselves to be dragged down by ideologies that promote an us-against-them mindset, or promote the idea of the existence of antagonistic projects.

Some Manichean ideologies seek to separate people into two groups whose entire thought is a reflection of their political identity. This is merely absurd, because those who take this up as an ideological banner for their politics forget that the same problem faces both them and us, and that we all suffer the same consequences, including violence, the proliferation of crime, the environmental degradation. Poverty is a multidimensional problem.

It is now commonly understood that over and above income levels, poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon and those multiple dimensions involve access to certain rights: housing, education, health, work and access to public service. The fight against poverty is a fight about access to rights and equity.

It is a complex problem. The existence of trapped and vicious circles within the problem of poverty is also common knowledge. Those phenomenona describe how different poverty-related factors interact in a system of interplay, that it makes it difficult to establish causal relationships between them and generate mechanisms whereby the phenomena feed back into each other.

Instead of an institutional change, what is needed is a shift in the destructive nature of institutions toward inclusiveness. Incremental progress with institutions' level of inclusiveness can be made, and those marginal changes can allow the emergence of capacities that transform the vicious circles and virtuous circles in countries, in communities and in households. It is a geographical problem.

The rich live where the rich live, and people in poverty live where people in poverty live. In the conditions that prevail in neighborhoods made up of poor households, the environment does not help aspirations. Destitution, overcrowding, violence and drug trafficking do not make for an environment where people can entertain aspirations for the medium term.

It is a real problem, and we need real solutions. All institutions should address the problem, the executive, the legislative, the judicial. However, all our policies related to fundamental freedoms, access to rights, fiscal policy, agriculture, education, housing, must point in the same direction, looking for the same solutions.

Of course, it requires dialogue among decision makers and political, economic and social organizations to build social, economic and political cohesion. But we need institutions that ensure rights for the people. This is not ideology.

We have seen countries with alternating governments from the left, right and center that achieve conditions of development and equality through design, implementation and execution of appropriate public policies. We have also seen the same alternation with poorly designed and executed policies which reproduce inequality and poverty. Without alternation, the situation is even worse.

We will always be oppressed and oppressors, and conditions for equality and equity will never be achieved. You can see a rich country transform in a poor country like Venezuela with a lack of fundamental freedoms, recreating and creating more poverty. We have to overcome the obstacles, and we have to work in this direction, every single institution.

And we highly appreciate that the Manifesto Against Poverty that we have seen here at the Organization of American States has the support of CAF to implement further policies, further projects that can help institutions to overcome this scourge of the Hemisphere. And the obstacles will be from the left and from the right because it has to be like that. Because the interests protected are sometimes from the left and sometimes from the right.

But the case is that we still have the same poverty in the continent. We still have people that live in extreme poverty, people that live in poverty, and we still have the most unequal region in the world. And that is a shame on us.

Thank you.